


For Every Ending, There's a Beginning

by heartofthesunrise



Category: My Chemical Romance, Reggie and the Full Effect
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-22
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-08-10 10:45:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7841707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartofthesunrise/pseuds/heartofthesunrise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Ray…” James was giving him one of those looks, and he came to sit on the edge of the bed with him and wrap his arm around Ray’s shoulders. “It was twelve years. It’s been two months.” </p><p>He didn’t want to say what he was thinking but everything about this, about being here with James, forced the words out of him. “Gerard’s good at it.”</p><p>James put his head on Ray’s shoulder. “You’re not Gerard.” </p><p>-</p><p>Two months after the MCR breakup becomes official, Ray flies out to Missouri to play guitar on the new Reggie and the Full Effect record. In a perfect world, he'll start to figure out what kind of musician he wants to be outside of My Chem. It's not a perfect world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Every Ending, There's a Beginning

_ Can you tell me, maybe, someday, baby _ _  
_ _ We’ll still be the way that we are, so fuckin crazy _

 

_ May 2013 _

 

Ray’s plane landed just before four and the terminal at Kansas City was so small that he could see the baggage claim from the gate, and just as clearly, he could see James’s unmistakable figure lingering by the carousel. 

He took a moment to gather himself. 

It hadn’t been so long, right? Not since they’d seen each other, maybe, but since they’d played together, well... It’d been a long time since he’d played with anyone. He took a breath and headed towards the baggage claim. 

“Oh my god,  _ there he is! _ ” James exclaimed in falsetto when he saw Ray, putting the back of his hand over his face and pretending to swoon.

“Come on, dude,” Ray groaned. He didn’t want to deal with getting recognized even on a good day, and the last couple of months since the announcement were nearly bereft of good days. He let himself collapse against James. 

Everything about him was comforting, from the twin faded lines of tattoos that ran down the centers his forearms to the way he was soft all over, and how he smelled so strongly of cigarettes that Ray got the immediate, bright nicotine rush just being near him. James steadied his hands on Ray’s shoulders and smiled his awkward offcenter smile, and wouldn’t let him carry his own luggage. 

The short drive from Kansas City to Liberty managed to take them past cornfields and honest-to-god picturesque big red barns. James was quiet at the wheel, but pleasantly so. He hummed along to the radio and didn’t prod too much at Ray, which was a relief. Christa would say he’d been moping, because she was matter-of-fact to a fault sometimes; Ray would say he’s been “working on it,” whatever “it” is. Some songs - or, the beginnings of them - which came in trickles and bursts like water from a faulty tap; the baby, which was overwhelming and delightful and strange all at once. 

He had been trying to keep busy, just to stave off the gnawing hollowness in his chest that the band used to fill. He wasn’t sure if it made it easier or harder, the fact that none of them hated each other. The fact that, at the bottom of it all, they’d split because they loved each other and wanted the best for one another. Ray felt weird texting Gerard, and he felt weirder about feeling weird, because they still saw one another often. Same with Mikey.

James decelerated off the highway and into Liberty, and it was weird, seeing him here. It was weird to think that James  _ belonged  _ anywhere, because he practically lived on the road, and even when he was home, home was Long Island, and  _ nobody _ belonged there. And here they were, pulling into the driveway of the house James grew up in, with his parents coming out onto the porch to meet them.

They had an early dinner with James’s parents, and then James was pulling him upstairs, lugging both his guitar cases for him, showing him around.

“I always get like this, it’s like. It feels like I’m home from college and I have to like show my cool out of town friends what’s cool about Kansas.” He set down Ray’s guitars just inside the door to what must be his room, if the worse-for-wear Duran Duran poster on the opposite wall was anything to go by. James noticed Ray noticing and said, “It’s mostly a guest room now. My mom just thinks that’s funny.”

Ray followed him in and James kicked the door shut after him. He couldn’t really imagine James as a child, so bound to one spot. Ray knew he’d given drum lessons out of the garage in this house as a teenager. He knew James had worked at a Pizza Hut in Lawrence after he dropped out of college. These were facts in an abstract, theoretical way that he couldn’t seem to apply to the man in front of him. 

James hefted the window open and propped it with an old hardcover book. “Mom doesn’t like me to smoke in the house,” he said by way of explanation, and then laughed because, god, they were in their thirties. Ray sat on James’s bed and watched him. 

This was a bizarre mirror image of what they’d been doing a year ago: James had finally agreed to join the band for real, and he’d come out to LA even though he hated it, and he’d worked harder than probably any of the rest of them on those songs. When James did interviews these days, he referred to it as “the MCR album that no one will ever hear, ever” and it made Ray’s stomach knot with guilt. He always thought they should apologize to James for asking him onboard just in time to bail the water out of a sinking ship. He didn’t think any of them ever had. 

Frankie, maybe, but Frankie was stung, too. 

“Hey,” Ray said. “How come you’re okay?”

James looked at him and dragged on the cigarette for a long moment before stubbing it out on the windowsill. It left a dark, ashy stain beside a dozen similar ones. 

“Y’know,” he said, finally. “When it was my band? The first time? I wasn’t.” He scrubbed his hand across his mouth. “It gets easier. Or, you get better at it.”

“I don’t think I’m getting better at it.” 

“Ray…” James was giving him one of those  _ looks _ , and he came to sit on the edge of the bed with him and wrap his arm around Ray’s shoulders. “It was twelve years. It’s been two months.” 

He didn’t want to say what he was thinking but everything about this, about being here with James, forced the words out of him. “Gerard’s good at it.”

James put his head on Ray’s shoulder. “You’re not Gerard.” 

The quiet of the street outside was broken, briefly, by the sound of a passing car with the windows down and the radio turned up, playing, of all things, “The Kids from Yesterday.” James barked out a laugh and Ray joined him, and turned his face into James’s shoulder and stayed there. 

When he looked up, James was watching him carefully. “You know you don’t have to be here, right? Fuck, I didn’t - I mean, I didn’t think of it but. You don’t have to do a record with me and Frankie, it’s… I don’t want this to like. Suck. For you.” 

“James, it doesn’t suck.” Ray attempted a smile. “It’s really, really good to see you.” 

Ray was familiar with a lot of James’s smiles, the awkward lopsided ones and the sincere ones that showed the little gap between his front teeth, and this one, which quirked his mouth to the left more than the right, and meant there was something he wasn’t saying. 

“Yeah, man,” he said. “Thanks for being here.”    
They spent the night in James’s childhood bedroom, with Ray in the twin bed and James on an air mattress on the floor, and drove out to the studio together early the next morning so that James could play Ray his demos. 

“This is the, y’know, the one I want the Ray Toro magic on the most,” he said, adjusting the faders and testing the levels carefully before handing the headphones to Ray. 

It was all there in the song, of course, even just the roughs with chords and drums and vocals, and bass that Frank had come down to play for him a few weeks earlier, and not much else. A space left where Ray was already itching to come thundering in with a solo, something straight from the heart, something that would wind around and above James’s synth line. 

“James…” he said, when he handed the headphones back. “You’re not supposed to come back from a five year hiatus with something this good, you’re supposed to be washed up.” 

James tried very hard not to look pleased. “You think you can come up with something?”

“I’ve already got ideas. Where else do you need me?” 

“There’s a couple things, here, listen to this one and see what you think.” 

James played him all his rough cuts, even the stupid ones and the ones that didn’t need guitar, and at the end of an hour he was glad he’d come. 

“So…” James asked, and he had that smile on again, the odd one. “What do you think?” 

Ray shook his head a little, just enough for his hair to fall into his face before he looked up. “It sounds like a Reggie record, man. Y’know I always loved that band.” 

James snorted. “Yeah, dude, me too.” 

There was some rehearsing to do, and especially some arrangements to work on for the big solo James wanted. They spent the better part of the afternoon working out some motifs, tossing ideas back and forth. It was the way they’d used to jam together in the back studio on the bus years ago, and it felt good. 

“I was thinking we could -” Ray played a little melody harmonized in thirds, indicating where he wanted James to come in. How could he have forgotten how natural this was?

James followed his lead and then subverted it, turned them around into something more melancholic. Ray played high up on the neck of his guitar, that box position where every rock player feels most at home, and let James guide him through the chord changes. They lost track of time. When James finally pulled a cadence out of somewhere and brought them to a stop, Ray felt like he’d run ten miles without stretching. It had all been taken out of him. 

Ed’s voice came over the PA into the sound booth: “Y’all know this is a sixteen-bar solo, right?”

James started laughing, and Ray joined him, and once they’d started they couldn’t seem to stop. Ed burned the session to a CD for them and shook his head knowingly, grinning, and pushed them out of the studio so he could get some real work done. 

“Guess you really did miss me,” James said smugly.

They listened to the CD on the drive home and the evidence was irrefutable. Yeah. He did. 

That night Ray couldn’t sleep. 

He was being careful to stay still, because James hardly slept ever, and it’d worried all of them on tours even though he always insisted he was fine. He was breathing slow and deep in the next bed, and Ray didn’t want to wake him. 

He was thinking about... everything. The band, and being here, and the dozens of half-truths and moments from the last twelve years that still needled him sometimes. If Gerard were there, he’d point out Ray’s tendency to think instead of act. If Mikey were there he’d just give Ray one of his careful, reserved looks. If Frank were there… Well, Frank would be there, sometime in the next couple of days, when he could get a flight. That was its own problem. 

Not a problem, not really. Only, he’d spent twelve years more than anything defining his style of playing contrary to Frank, and as much as to him the band meant writing with Gerard and all of the collaboration and weird vulnerability that entailed, at least as much of it was tied up in this push and pull against Frank. Frank, the natural frontman; Frank, the fan favorite; Frank, the punk lifer, which would always be a cooler and more interesting identity than Ray, the classicist. And if Ray won the critical acclaim but no one noticed, did it really matter? 

Ray was a little surprised James didn’t have Frank on as a guitarist. He wondered what Frank thought about that. 

When Ray turned onto his side, trying to put the thought out of his head, he must not have been quiet enough. 

“You up?” James whispered. When James whispered it still came out gravelly and rough, a testament to twenty years of chain-smoking and faux death metal growling and making everybody laugh. 

“Little bit,” Ray said. “Sorry.” 

“Nah, man, I was already awake,” James said. “You know me.” 

It felt a lot like a sleepover, actually, the way the room was dark and the house was quiet. More than that, it was the strange, honest feeling in Ray’s chest. “You don’t miss it at all?” he asked finally. 

James was quiet for a long moment, and then he sat up, abrupt, and looked at Ray through the gloom. “Let’s get burgers,” he said. 

They had to go back to Kansas City to do it, but there was a 24-hour Sonic drive-in and James ordered over the intercom for both of them without having to ask Ray what he wanted. They didn’t stay, though - James tipped the carhop well and drove them back to the highway, and then back to the deserted streets of Liberty. James pulled into the parking lot of a quiet college campus, already empty for the summer. 

“You know I used to go to school here?” he asked Ray, pulling the key out of the ignition and getting out. He had the paper bag with their burgers in it under one arm. “For like, a minute.” 

“Are we allowed to be here?” Ray was following him not without a little trepidation. Ray was well-versed in horror movies. 

James shot him a look that, even on his thirty-seven year-old face, said “be cool, man” in the voice of an exasperated twenty-something. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

They followed a walking path to a road lined on either side by flowering cherry trees, then followed that to the campus football field. 

“Come on,” James said. He led Ray to a perforated hole in the chain-link and held it aside so Ray could scramble through, then followed him, letting the fence rattle back into place. They were underneath a wide section of bleachers, which was some manner of picturesque cliche already, but James wouldn’t stop moving until they were up in the stands, sitting together but apart. James handed Ray the paper bag and lit himself a cigarette in almost the same motion. 

“You’re really never gonna quit?” Ray asked, peeling back the greasy paper on his burger. 

James gave him a pointed look. “I quit everything else, Ray.” Ray handed him back the burger bag. “I quit  _ almost _ everything else, Ray.” 

Ray laughed. They ate in companionable quiet. The moonlight in the midwest was different, bigger, somehow. It painted the grass on the football field in silvery hues, and lit the smoke from James’s cigarette just so, making it look almost tangible before it diffused above them. Jersey was all light pollution and, more than that, factory pollution, never properly dark enough to see the brightness of the moon. LA was the same, but different. In LA everything mostly looked fake and beautiful, and Ray mostly didn’t mind. 

They sat for what felt like a long time, watching the sky beginning, just barely, to grow pale along the eastern horizon. It was still properly night where they were, the axial tilt of the planet just beginning to roll them slowly, inevitably, towards dawn. 

“Of course I miss it,” James said. “I miss everything, all the time, don’t you know me at all?” 

Ray wanted to laugh but he couldn’t quite make himself do it, even for James. 

“Right,” he said, instead, and it sounded flat in the still air in front of him.

“Change is good, dude, even though it basically never feels good. And like, it might not, ever. I’m gonna miss being on the road with you guys for probably the rest of my life.” He snorted and took a drag of his cigarette. “You know we used to jam like we did today  _ every day _ ? Ray, of course I miss it.”

There was no one in the world as unapologetically earnest as James Dewees. 

“So what’s…” Ray felt awfully melodramatic even thinking it. “What’s the point, then?” 

It was quiet for a moment, and then James was laughing at him, full-on, bent over with his hand on the bleacher seat between them to steady himself. “Dude, I write songs about chickens, don’t ask me about the meaning of life.” He lit another cigarette and shifted closer to Ray. “The point is…” He paused long enough to drag on the cigarette. “Man this’d be way easier if you’d started a solo project like ten years ago.” 

Ray laughed. It was wet and strange in his chest. 

“Like…” James slumped over on Ray’s shoulder with his full weight, so Ray had to put an arm around him to keep him upright. “You keep making things. You keep caring about stuff. You make sure that before anything else you feel, you know… Grateful. For what you’ve got and what you don’t have anymore. Y’know?” James twisted to look up at him. The cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth, and smoke curled up from between his parted lips. Beyond him, the sky was turning the earl grey color of morning. “And if you’re really lucky you get to hang onto the people who matter, and make ‘em play on your records sometimes.”

Ray stared down at him. James smiled his odd, little smile. Ray plucked the cigarette from his lips with two fingers and leaned down to kiss him. 

The field was entirely still, and the ridged metal of the bleacher seats dug into Ray’s palm where he leaned back on it. There were no birds, no rumbling cars. There was no breeze to hem them in against each other, and yet...

James leaned up into the kiss; he tasted like cigarettes and salt, and Ray opened his mouth against him on instinct. The field around them beat with a profound silence, and Ray breathed through his nose in rushing, desperate breaths that seemed impossibly loud to him. Every sound - the way James’s stubble scraped against him, the wet noise when their lips pressed together - was amplified in the empty predawn. Ray could’ve heard James’s heart beating if it hadn’t been pressed against his chest, stuttering a syncopation with his own.

“Fuck,” he said, putting his hand to the side of James’s neck. 

James laughed, and it felt odd against Ray’s lips, and then they were kissing again. “You know,” James said, and then he seemed to lose his place somewhere in the hollow space between Ray’s parted lips. He pulled back for a moment. “I’m all for constructive ways to handle a crisis, but -”

Ray cut him off with his tongue. He didn’t want to talk. They drew closer together, two shapes high up in the bleachers blurring into one. What they must look like, from the ground. Ray kissed the corner of James’s mouth and the hinge of his jaw and the base of his throat, and James didn’t try to interrupt him. 

All at once, the pale vault of dawn drew itself over them. “Ray,” James said, not admonishing him or encouraging him, but insisting all the same. “What are you doing?” 

Ray curled his arm around James’s middle. “I’m kissing you,” he said, and did it. 

It was well and truly morning by the time they snuck back out through the fence and to James’s car, and on the drive home they passed the neighborhood busybodies watering their lawns and getting their morning papers and greeting one another in slippers and bathrobes. Ray could still taste James’s cigarette on the back of his teeth. It was reckless, incredible, to quietly let themselves back into James’s parents’ house and to try to make it to bed undetected before anyone woke up. Ray dragged James up into the twin bed and held onto him with both arms and one of his legs so they’d both fit, however poorly.

They went in to record that day and laid out Ray’s solo on the third take. It wasn’t as natural, as real, to play alone in the booth, but he caught James’s eye on the other side of the glass and the familiar tautness that suffused the way they played together filled him. It was remarkably easy to play like himself, whatever that meant - what hadn’t come naturally to him writing his own music was waiting for him, here, with James. 

When James traded places with him in the booth to record his synths, it took longer, involved more multitracking. This was what it felt like, Ray realized, to be a hired gun: it was the easy part. 

James adjusted the settings on his Korg and went through the song again, and then another time to add his part against Ray’s solo. He listened for it, shaking his hands out, and nailed it right away. He didn’t seek out Ray’s eyes the way Ray had looked for his.  _ Because he’s a fucking professional _ , Ray couldn’t help but think. 

They laid down a few more tracks, some things they’d been talking about, and sketched out a couple of ideas for when Frank got there. He’d texted James at some point during the night to let him know he was booking a flight for tomorrow morning, and that if James and Ray didn’t both come to pick him up at the airport he’d be “a real bitch about it.” Ray hadn’t seen him since before they’d announced the split. He missed him in a way that was at once sharp and ugly and vivid. 

Neither of them said anything about the night, or what had happened that morning. When they went to bed, though, James tugged Ray down onto the air mattress with him and they folded in against each other, James’s big hands on Ray’s back and in his hair, and Ray putting his long limbs to use getting as close to James as he could. 

“Hey,” Ray said into the side of James’s neck. “Can I ask you another stupid life question?”

“Depends,” James said. He rubbed Ray’s back with a broad, slow rhythm. “Are you going to kiss me stupid when I answer?” 

“Depends what you say, I guess.” 

“Go for it.” 

“Okay, so like…” Now, given the opportunity, he couldn’t find the words for what he’d felt in the studio. “You’re really…”  _ Fuck _ . “What if I can’t do it?” 

Under his arms, Ray felt James lift his shoulders up and drop them, heavy. “I dunno, dude.”

“That’s not a great answer.”

“It’s not a great question.” James twitched a little in Ray’s grip, and Ray eased up enough so that he could pull back, so that they could look at one another face to face. “It’s not easy, even when it looks easy. You know that already.” 

A frown, unbidden, tugged at the corner of Ray’s lips. He  _ did _ know. Hadn’t his proudest moments with the band been dredged up from the jaws of hell? Hadn’t they seemed effortless to an untrained eye? 

“You’ve got a really great record, James,” he said instead. “We kinda thought you’d never do another one after  _ Crappy Town _ . Or, I mean -” and this was the guilty admission - “I think we kinda hoped you wouldn’t, so you’d actually. You know. Join the band for real.” 

“Nah,” James said dismissively, but he couldn’t douse the smug smile pulling at his mouth. “I was never gonna be one of you, not for real.”

“You were, though,” Ray insisted. “Even if you didn’t want to play on our records because you, like, hate money, or something -”

“I hate LA. The money would’ve been nice.”

“Shut up, the point is. We always thought of you as an equal. Gerard especially.” This wasn’t necessarily his secret to tell, but he didn’t think Gerard would ever cop to it. “It kinda hurt his feelings, all those times you said no.” 

James was quiet for a very long time, and when he spoke, it was to admit a secret of his own.

“He asked me to help him with some demos for a solo album. He wants to put it out next fall, once my tour’s done.” 

“Oh.” Ray felt nauseous. They’d announced the breakup  _ two months ago _ . And everyone had expected Frank to get something out right away, Frank had done other projects, but Gerard… Gerard who had always needed Ray to write the music for him, Gerard who had wanted to start with something fresh and unmarred by the weight of the band they’d built together. “Okay.”

“Ray…” 

“It’s okay, really,” Ray said quickly. He wanted the best for them both, honest. 

“It felt weird, you not knowing.” James looked guilty and sad, and Ray didn’t want him to be, so he pressed forward and kissed him until neither of them were thinking about what was and what wasn’t anymore. 

When Frank’s plane landed the next day Ray and James were at the airport, no more well-rested than they had been the previous morning, but glad to see him all the same. Frank tumbled through security and into James’s arms with the clumsy elegance only he possessed. 

He pushed his sunglasses up on his head and looked Ray up and down. “Have you been putting him through his paces?” he said to James out of the corner of his mouth. 

James laughed, a gruff, pleased sound. “It’s Reggie, not rocket science. He’s keeping me on my toes.” 

Ray nodded. “I’m the studio magic,” he said. “Heard you’re a bass player.” 

Frank stuck his tongue out at him. “Only for James,” he said. “James and nobody else.” 

That sounded about right, for all of them, honestly. 

They actually drove straight to the studio. Frank was only in town for a day and a half to lay down the vocals he hadn’t been able to do when he’d come in to put his bass parts to tape. Between the three of them they managed to flesh out the majority of the vocal harmonies. James used to do all the vocals on Reggie records before, as he put it, “Marlboro killed his choirboy chops.” They put on more and more overdubs, and James goaded Ray into recording a guide vocal for something Adam Lazzara was supposed to come in to sing later that month, and by the time Ed kicked them out of the studio the sunset was darkening. They’d missed it. 

“Okay,” Frank yawned, dragging his suitcase up the walk to James’s parents’ house. “I need to pass out about four hours ago, point me at the nearest couch.” 

“You’re in Smack’s room,” James said, pushing Frank up the stairs in front of him. “That’s, like, the master suite if your criteria is not having to sleep underneath a huge picture of Simon le Bon’s bad fashion choices.” 

“God, you still have that up?” Frank laughed. Frank had been here a lot more than Ray had, he guessed. 

“It’s my mom, you know, she’s not a Simon fan but she’s always been weak for Nick Rhodes.”

“Like mother, like son.” Frank leered, and James steered him into the next bedroom and shut the door behind him. “Night, guys,” Frank called through the closed door.

“Night, Frankie!” James and Ray said in unison. They went into James’s room together and reveled in a moment of quiet while Ray hunted down a clean t-shirt and shucked his jeans. James watched him do it. 

“Was it super weird?” he asked, finally. 

“Yeah,” Ray said. “Of course it was, dude. But it was okay.” 

James pressed Ray back, slowly and gently, until the bed hit him in the back of the knees and he had to sit down. “It’s my turn,” he said, pushing Ray down and climbing over him, spreading his knees around Ray’s hips to pin him in place. 

“Your turn?” 

“To ask you a life question.” He put his hands over Ray’s forearms. He loomed over him. 

“Oh. Yeah, okay.” 

It was hard to imagine what James might want to know, what secret Ray might possess that James could have a use for. He tested James’s grip on his arms and found himself effectively stuck. He tried to lean up to kiss James, but his range of motion was too limited, and James wouldn’t indulge him. 

“What are you trying to get out of this, Ray?” 

It was like all the heat had been abruptly sucked out of the room, like they were the only two objects in a perfect vacuum. Ray felt, suddenly and keenly, the way his skin fit on him. James was watching him with intense focus. 

He wanted to be kissing James. He wanted to be back home with his wife and son. He wanted… He wanted his fucking band back. “I don’t know,” he said, which was true, at least. 

“Does it help?” James asked. 

Ray pulled free of James’s loosening grip and wrapped his arms around him, and pulled him down so that they were pressed flush against one another. “I don’t know,” he said again, and he kissed him deeply and thoroughly. 

James’s forearms didn’t taste like much of anything, just skin and salt, and Ray licked a broad stripe up one of them before kissing his palm and his knuckles. His hands tasted like a thousand packs of cigarettes, more than his mouth did. When he got James’s shirt off, his chest tasted mostly like he was due for a shower. Ray supposed he was about the same.

They didn’t speak again until an hour later. 

They lay side by side in James’s childhood bed, too big for it to really contain them, touching all along their sides. James’s chest rose and fell, and when he finally spoke it was in a true whisper, one that didn’t betray the way his voice was in real life, outside of the quiet space between them. 

“You can’t live in the past forever, Ray,” he said. “Trust me.” 

“I don’t want to.” 

James turned to look at him, and it should have been too much, with what they’d just done and the way they were, together. “You want to a little bit,” he said. That odd smile that Ray had noticed two days ago, twitched more to the left than the right, no longer held a mystery in its corners. 

Ray sighed. “Yeah, you’re right.” 

“It’s okay to want to,” James said. “Just, you know. You’re your own person.” He was considering what he wanted to say next very carefully. “You don’t need him to be a great musician.” 

“Well,” Ray said evenly. “He doesn’t need me.” 

“He might. He doesn’t want to do it alone. Neither of you are -” he jerked his head at the adjoining wall where, god willing, Frank was asleep.

“Thank god for small miracles,” Ray said. 

Between them, James took his hand and laced their fingers together. The stars and the vague reflected light from the streetlamps outside illuminated them both with a strange luminosity, like between them they were something more than two men past their prime.

“Thank you for coming to play on the record,” James said, like that was really what was at stake here. Ray couldn’t not laugh.

They finished up the vocals that day and drove Frank to the airport straight from the studio, giving him instructions to kiss his children and his dogs for them. Ray ruffled his hair the way he used to and pushed him towards the line for security. They watched him until he passed through the scanners at the far end of the terminal and was lost to sight. 

Ray’s flight was the next day. On the drive back to Liberty, he watched the way James’s forearms flexed when he tightened his grip on the wheel, and the easy, confident way he shifted down through the gears on the freeway off ramp. There was nothing left for them to do. 

Alone again in James’s old room, under the now-familiar gaze of the Duran Duran poster, Ray took a breath to speak and, instead, let it out on a long sigh. He watched James, and watched the way James was watching him. 

“You don’t need any other guitars?” he asked, finally. “It’s not too late to change my flight.” 

James stepped forward, skirting the edge of the air mattress on the ground, directly in front of Ray so that the toes of their shoes touched. “Don’t make excuses,” he said, with his face turned down so that he was looking into the gap between them. When he lifted his head the look he gave Ray was like a question and a set of instructions and an admonishment all in one, and Ray couldn’t help himself. He tugged James into his arms and held him there. 

“Okay,” he said finally, but he didn’t let go for a long time. 

When James brought Ray to the airport, early the next morning, he carried his bags for him and got annoyed when he tried to help. When the bags were checked and the boarding pass was well in hand they loitered by the entrance to the security line like they hadn’t with Frank. 

“James,” Ray said, and then he didn’t know how to continue. He looked down at his boarding pass. 

“It’s okay,” James told him. He looked really fucking sincere, too, with his hair still bedhead messy and his eyes, exhausted and dark, focused on Ray. “Go home. It’s good for you.” He put his hand on Ray’s shoulder. “Call me when you make your record, I owe you one.” 

“You got it, man,” Ray said. He shouldered his carry-on and looked around for a moment before pulling James in by the wrist and hugging him. He didn’t know when he’d see him again, or if he even could. There was so much tied up in this, even outside of the two of them. He wanted to kiss James, and he wanted to never have done so in equal measure. 

“I mean it, Ray,” James said. “Tell me when it happens.” He peered into Ray’s face, hard. “I don’t want to see you stuck.” 

“I will,” Ray told him. “Look, I’ll see you soon, right? I’ll have something to play for you then, I bet. And… thanks for asking me to come out here. I know you don’t, like, think of this as serious shit but it’s a special record, you know.”

“Yeah,” James said. He gave Ray another strange, calculating look, and then nodded towards the ever-lengthening line for security. “You’d better get going.” 

“Right. Okay. Well. I’ll see you later.” From the security line he found himself watching James, hesitating in the terminal, even more than James was watching him. He turned to give his ID over to the TSA agent at the front of the line, and when he turned back to catch a last glimpse of James, he was gone. 

Ray was at his gate when his phone buzzed. It was a text from James. 

_ i hate goodbyes. write your album. you have shit to say. promise  _

He thought about the solo he’d played with James, and the way it felt to see Frank again. A kid at the next gate wandered over and discreetly asked Ray for his autograph, and it didn’t make his stomach wrench with guilt the way it used to. The first night he’d spent with James, up on the bleachers, he’d finally asked him after ten years of knowing him: 

“What do your tattoos mean?”

And James had given him a surprised look, like he should just  _ know _ , and knowing James, maybe he should’ve. It was so exactly like him. He’d pointed to his right arm. “For every beginning, there’s an ending.” Then his left. “For every ending, there’s a beginning.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired primarily by "Disregard" and "Kanji Tattoos... Still in Style??" from the Reggie and the Full Effect record _No Country for Old Musicians._ Written in a weekend. Appreciate James Dewees 2k16.


End file.
